Chinese-American Protesters Seeing Red at Nixon Library

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace (now Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum) opened in 1990 and for nearly that long there has been a permanent Hall of World Leaders exhibit featuring life-size statues of such history-shapers as Winston Churchill, Charles deGaulle and Mao Tse-Tung.

It's the inclusion of that last fellow—China's deceased "Chairman Mao" of the Long March, Little Red Book and Beatles "Revolution" fame—that has finally sparked a protest against the Yorba Linda fun zone.

Los Angeles-based, Chinese-American activist Kai Chen is organizing the demonstration scheduled for Thursday, after which he plans to hand museum officials signed petitions demanding the Mao statue be removed.

Chen's got no one to blame but the guy whose name is chiseled onto the front of the joint.

After all, it was Nixon who personally selected Mao for the library's tribute to influential world leaders the 37th U.S. president worked with during his interrupted reign. To take it back another step, Nixon in 1972 became the first U.S. president to visit the People's Republic of China and is credited with opening diplomatic relations with the Communist regime.

What the hell was he thinking?

"To even mention Mao with democratic leaders such as Churchill and Golda Meir in the same breath is truly an insult to human intelligence and offensive to all the freedom-loving people in the world," Chen, who emigrated from China in 1981, tells the Orange County Register.

Don't count this guy out. His complaints led to the removal of a painting of Mao from a Chinese New Year exhibit in Alhambra City Hall in 2007. Chen now has the distinction of being the first person to complain about a statue featured in the Hall of World Leaders, which also includes such Commie all-stars as Chou En-lai, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.

(To be fair, the display is rounded out by Egypt's Anwar el-Sadat, West Germany's Konrad Adenauer and Japan's Shigeru Yoshida.)

As a Nixon library official told the Register, displaying statues of world leaders—in this case, long dead ones—does not mean the federally run facility endorses their policies.

Ah, but there may be more to this out-in-the-open, clandestine-Red China-Commie plot unfolding in the heart of Nixonland. Chen's protest also coincides with the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. And that coincides with another, dare we say controversial exhibit the private foundation that built the Nixon library is involved in: "Ping Pong Diplomacy: The Rematch."

You read that right, Joe McCarthy: the Nixon Foundation is one of the sponsors of an Oct. 17-18 table tennis tournament aimed at harkening back to the original 1971 and 1972 table tennis events between the United States and Chinese national table tennis teams that became known as "Ping Pong Diplomacy."

Featuring American and Chinese champs, Olympians, collegiate athletes and ripe-for-brainwashing youths, the tourney runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day at Orange County's version of Red Square: South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.

Mr. President, tear down these balls!

And get this: this red-loving Love-In is tied to "Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: A Festival Celebrating Chinese Culture."

For the love of God, is there no end to this blatant Commie indoctrination?

Apparently not, for The Manchurian Candidatesque plot thickens: another exhibit bowing to Mao, this one displaying archival photographs from the original "Ping Pong Diplomacy" competition as well as photographs documenting Nixon's trip into the heart of darkness (China), will also be featured.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.